I’m sorry, today’s radio comedy hasn’t a clue
Classic shows are more popular than new. So how worried should we be, asks Chris Bennion
This week it was revealed, via a Radio Times poll of experts and insiders, that the “panel show antidote” I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, is the greatest radio comedy of all time. Quite what the show’s most regular correspondent, Mrs Trellis of North Wales, would make of it we don’t know. Perhaps she might remark on the fact that she has been writing letters to the programme since 1972 and that nothing better has been made in the intervening 48 years.
The rest of the top six is made up of Hancock’s Half Hour (1954), Round the Horne (1965), The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1978), The Goon Show (1951) and that young whippersnapper On the Hour (1991). Decades of technological advancement and we are still glued to a nearly 50-year-old panel show and comedies first broadcast when Vera Lynn’s Forget Me Not was in the charts.
Is it simply the case that they don’t make them like that any more? Well, yes. Scrambling to switch Radio 4 off at 6.30pm, before the half-hour “comedy” slot begins, is almost a national sport, with its overreliance nce on “fast-paced” topical comedy (the interminable The Now Show) and laboured spoofs ( Bleak Expectations, ions, Angstrom). The quality of the people ople involved in these shows only serves ves to highlight the writing, which often n feels like it was knocked out five minutes before the show began. What a relief it is when you hear that it’s ’s an archive recording, a long-running g favourite such as Just a Minute or something by John Finnemore. The poll backs this up, with only one new series from the past decade making the Top 20.
Finnemore’s is the rare